Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The "Hispanic Vote": An Insult Latinos Can Do Without

Everybody I talk to is in a foul mood about the
condition and performance of American politics and government. And my topic in
this blog does start out as another of the many discouraging malfunctions that
would earn our politics a formal downgrade if political systems had to face the
equivalent of a Standard and Poor's review. But read on. I argue in the end for
the real possibility of corrective reform from within.

That our immigration policy is
"broken" has no dissenter, and this is no marginal matter. As Ronald
Reagan said, if your immigration law is unenforced you can wind up losing your
country - and he had not seen what a few illegal residents could do in New York
with one jet airplane.

But unenforced it increasingly was -
before, during, and after Reagan. Predictably, some might say. After all, most
developed countries' immigration law and policy are built to generate trouble,
for they bring into the country people with strong loyalties to the nation of
birth and to the relatives left behind. We are familiar with the American
story, where many immigrants urge their kin to join them in the new country. A
few ideologues pressure the host nation to weaken all immigration limits or
(think Cuba) terminate them entirely. Ethnicity entrepreneurs claiming to speak
for all immigrants of their nationality lobby to weaken or abandon immigration
law's core effort to limit and select in the national interest. They meddle in
the adopted country's foreign and domestic policies, sometimes with unwanted
strategic effect.

Sometimes. Which is too often, and it
is happening now. Recall that the U.S. beginning in the early 1980s has devoted
substantial national effort in a three decade-long reform effort to repair the
gaping holes and vulnerabilities found in our immigration system by
presidential or national commissions in the terms of Jimmy Carter, Ronald
Reagan, and Bill Clinton - holes and vulnerabilities also found and exploited
by terrorists planning 9/11. This reform effort, despite supportive public
opinion, remains frustrated and unfulfilled and adds to the growing record of
U. S. governmental incompetence.

The forces responsible for this
immigration policy paralysis are well known: employers avid for cheaper labor,
white-guilt liberals in universities, media, and religious bodies, and ethnic
lobbyists claiming to speak for ethnic "blocs" hostile to limits - of
which the Hispanic bloc is the most frequently invoked. And least scrutinized.

A Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in
the 1920s and awakening today would be astonished at this configuration of
immigration politics. He would expect the growing number of Latino lobbyists to
testify in Washington for firm border patrols to curb illegal immigration from
Mexico, recalling that was the stance of Mexican American lobbyists for much of
the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in the 1920s the new League of
United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) told congressional committees that
unchecked Mexican immigration would intensify discrimination against U.S.
citizens of Mexican descent and impede their economic and social advancement.
In the 1960s one of these Americans of Mexican descent, Cesar Chavez, began to
organize the United Farm Workers (UFW) along the southwestern border and became
this nation's most revered Hispanic leader. His fledgling union battled growers
who fought UFW strikes with what Chavez called "scabs" from Mexico.
These "hated illegal newcomers" became a career-long, unsolved
problem for him, in the words of one of his biographers, Richard Etulain.
Chavez "turned his head on occasion when his supporters used violence
against illegal workers" and, acknowledging that attitudes in the
Mexican-American community were "deeply divided", said in a 1979
speech at the National Press Club in Washington that if his mother was an
illegal strikebreaker, he would ask that the law be enforced and that she be
removed.

Chavez is gone now, though he never
changed his mind on the harm done to American citizens of Mexican descent by
large flows of illegal Mexican labor. Historians of Mexicans in the U.S.
generally agree on the centrality of the theme of labor competition within that
ethnic community. "The endless flow of labor from across the border undermined
the farm labor and civil rights movements, created enormous strains in the
Mexican American community, and increased animosity toward Mexican Americans in
general," wrote University of North Carolina historian Zaragosa Vargas, in
his Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in
Twentieth-Century America.

Hispanic lobbyists today dislike
being reminded of what might be called the Chavez heritage of Mexican American
resentment of economic and social competition from illegal Mexican and Central
American workers. They uniformly claim that now there is a reliable
"Hispanic vote" ready to punish any politician proposing to resist
illegal entry into the U. S. This alleged Latino voting and marching majority
will flood to the candidates and party taking the softest immigration policy
position, i.e. amnesty for illegals, expanded visas for guest-workers and
others - essentially an open border.

*
* *

Though nobody has said as much on the public
record seen by me, this oft-repeated claim that there exists a "Hispanic
immigration voting bloc" dedicated to open borders could be seen as deeply
insulting to Latinos. On this issue the rest of us are invited to conclude that
Hispanic voters care more for the expansion of the numbers of their ethnic
cohort (a misleading concept, as most Spanish-speaking people in America
identify with nation of origin and not with "Hispanic" or
"Latino") than other social and economic issues. And that their
history of opposition to the influx of illegals has somehow evaporated. And
that they give no weight in their voting calculations to the national interest
in secure borders and the rule of law. We could also conclude that Hispanics in
the voting booths passively vote as their open-borderish handlers dictate.
Unflattering.

Fortunately, much evidence points
away from such unpleasant conclusions about Latinos as voters, an important
dimension of citizenship. University of Texas political science professor
Rudolfo de la Garza has written that, during the 1950s and 1960s, "Mexican
American leaders were among the most vociferous of the opponents to continued
Mexican immigration." A l983 the Urban Institute reported that 54 percent
of Latinos in southern California believed that illegal immigrants were having
an "unfavorable impact." Journalist Ruben Navarrette wrote in 1994
that pollsters invariably find Latinos "more eager than the rest of the
population to control the nation's borders." The Ford Foundation-sponsored
Latino National Political Survey in 1992 reported that, while there was no
"Latino" or "Hispanic" bloc in any sense of those words,
taking data from Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans now citizens of the U.S.,
the LNPS survey found that more than 65 percent of each group believed that
there were currently "too many immigrants coming to the U.S."

When California's Proposition 187
went on the ballot in 1994, proposing to deny public services to illegal
aliens, early polls showed a majority of Hispanic voters in favor. Only a
sustained and well-financed campaign by ethnic activists, Catholic clergy, and
the liberal media brought the Hispanic vote for Prop 187 down to 31 percent.

In the 21st century Hispanic
attitudes and voting behavior continued to ignore the predictions of ethnic
"leaders." On the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama a coalition
of Latino organizations met in Washington to set out the priorities they
expected the new president to adopt in gratitude for "the Hispanic
vote". An amnesty for illegals was #1 on their list, confirming the
accuracy of writer Linda Chavez's observation in her memoir, Out of the Barrio,
where she observed that the "so-called self-appointed Hispanic
leadership" was badly out of step with grassroots Hispanic opinion. The
Pew Hispanic Center as Obama took office released a poll that asked Latinos
what issues they considered "extremely important". The economy,
education, health care, national security and the environment ranked ahead of
immigration, though it was not clear what respondents wished done about the latter.
A year later a Zogby poll found 56 percent of Hispanics agreeing that
immigration was "too high".

*
* *

To learn from this poll evidence that Latino
voters are not a bloc in a white heat to dictate an open border opens up
remarkable possibilities for radical change in the politics of immigration.
There seems to be almost no intra-Latino debate on immigration issues, at least
not in public. It is time for Hispanic leadership from outside the ranks of the
paid lobbyists at La Raza and MALDEF to articulate a modern version of the
Chavez conception of an immigration policy and stance that is beneficial to
Latinos legally in the country and takes as a starting point the control and
limitation of human flows across our borders.

Fragmentary starts on the
articulation of this vision have been made in the essays of Richard Estrada,
Linda Chavez, and Luis Acle. In 1998 Hispanic journalist Roberto Suro gave the
intellectual underpinning of Chavez' opposition to illegals a larger statement
and more polished expression in his book Strangers Among Us. "Latinos will
always be handicapped," he wrote, "so long as a large proportion of
the Latino population is made up of people who have no legal standing in the
U.S." He urged "punitive measures" against illegals by governments,
backed by resident citizen Latinos "who must accept the fact that a
large-scale illegal influx is harmful to their long-term interests." He
urged "Ten years of consistent enforcement" of five- to 10-year bans
on legal entry for violators of immigration law and even sponsoring kin who
harbor them. The foundation of all this must be a computer-based registry
system. "The wild card of illegal immigration has to be taken out of
play," Suro closes his argument, and "until Latinos themselves reject
illegal immigration they can never conclude the essential transaction that will
win them acceptance" in America.

*
* *

Building the intellectual foundations of a
modern Cesar Chavez Intellectual must be followed by political leadership,
which may be coming forward in the rising careers of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio
and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, prominent among those Latino politicians
who seem to be searching to rediscover a rule-of-law-compatible immigration
language and policy with which minorities could move more smoothly into the
mainstream.